The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  The burden of this text, however, rests not simply on the comparison between the temporary and the permanent, the instability of earth compared to the utter reliability of heaven, but rather on the place of human affection: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Jesus is not necessarily against earthly treasure, but he is against the seductions and illusions by which humans are tempted to worship only that which they can see and quantify. This is perhaps the ultimate problem with the rich ruler—not that he is wicked but that he is subject to the tyranny of that which he sees and knows. For Jesus, if you have the right kind of treasure, spiritual treasure, your heart will follow. Riches deceive and seduce fallible human beings. Riches themselves are neutral, but the effect they have is destructive on those who have them or who seek after them. If Jesus can be said to have a policy on wealth, this is it. Those who do not believe this are already lost to the kingdom of heaven; a painful example of this is the rich, but sorrowful, young ruler.

  It is possible to gather from the gospels what may be regarded as Jesus’ principles concerning wealth. Nowhere are these listed as such, but taking into account the social circumstances of the healing stories, the miracles, and the parables, and the explicit teachings ascribed to Jesus in the synoptic gospels and the gospel of John, it is possible to construct a view of wealth that is consistent with the implications of the story of the rich ruler, and with the explicit instruction not to gather up worldly wealth.

  Rich Is Not Necessarily Bad

  First, Jesus does not regard the possession of wealth as in itself unlawful. Those who have wealth are not by definition sinful, and he does not, as do some of the psalmists, assume that prosperity equals wickedness. In fact, he employs the wise use of money to make moral points, as with the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:14–30, the parable of the pounds in Luke 19:12–27, and the parable of the unjust steward in Luke 16:1–8. In the story of his encounter with the rich tax collector in Luke 19:2, Jesus does not condemn the wealth of Zacchaeus, even though it is ill-gotten. He does not command that Zacchaeus divest himself of his fortune, and when Zacchaeus does so in an act of repentance and restitution, Jesus does not require that he give up such wealth as may still be left to him.

  Wealth Is a Gift and Not a Reward

  Second, for Jesus, as for much of the Old Testament, wealth is a gift of God, not necessarily a reward but a gift nevertheless. Indeed, it may even be said that the wealth is God’s, and is only loaned to the one who takes its benefit on earth. “What we need the Lord will provide” is the substance of this particular view of wealth. The provisions of God are surety against the anxiety of human beings. In Luke 12:22–31, Jesus invokes the famous invitation to “consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not neither do they spin,” which is usually used as a text against materialism. I have used it frequently in this way myself, and such use is of course justified by the invitation that appears a few verses following, to “sell your possessions and give alms,” a version of laying up treasure in heaven rather than on earth. As far as earth is concerned, however, the reason that the faithful are not to worry is that the Lord will provide what they need. Do not be anxious for food, drink, or clothing. Seek the kingdom, Jesus says, and “these things shall be yours as well.” (Luke 12:31)

  Wealth Is a Means and Not an End

  Wealth, for Jesus, is a subordinate good, a means rather than an end. The trick to moral, faithful living is not to confuse means with ends and not to be deluded by the tangible as a substitute for the imperishable. Upon those who have wealth there is a burden of responsibility to use it wisely and not only for themselves. In fact, how one uses wealth in this life will have significant consequences in the life to come, and that is important because the life to come lasts longer than this one. Thus in the parable of Dives and Lazarus in Luke 16:19–21, Dives, the rich man who feasted sumptuously and arrayed himself in purple, had no sense of philanthropy to the poor man at his gates, Lazarus. He, in assuming that his earthly riches and power were his and permanent, failed to exercise a just stewardship of that which God had only loaned him. When he died he went to Hades, and Lazarus, miserable in this life, went to heaven. Dives from Hades asks Abraham, in whose bosom Lazarus now rejoices, to help him out of his torment. The answer is chilling: “Son,” says Abraham, speaking to Dives, “remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish.” As if that were not enough, Abraham goes on to say, “And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.” (Luke 16:24—26) Of Dives, who was rich in the things of this world but did not use them wisely or acknowledge from whom they came, we can summarize in the words of an old storefront preacher: “He had it, he ‘bused it, he lost it, and he won’t never get it back.”

  Wealth Is an Obligation to the Law

  Wealth, for Jesus, imposes an obligation upon its use, and a moral responsibility in acquiring and maintaining it. The one who is wealthy is all the more subordinate to the summary of the law that in Matthew 22:37–39 speaks of love of God and love of neighbor. The wealthy must be generous in proportion to their wealth. This is the basis of the negative comparison between the poor widow in Luke 21:1–4 and the rich. The widow’s mite represented all that she had, and thus her two copper coins represented infinitely more of a sacrifice than the alms of the rich who “contributed out of their abundance.” The principle of stewardship always to be applied is the familiar one: to whom much is given much is expected. Giving in this sense of expectation is not optional, it is the requirement of wealth. Such giving, however, is not to be ostentatious nor is it to be done to warrant praise or earthly pleasure. “Beware of practicing your piety before men in order to be seen by them; for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.” This requirement of modest generosity certainly goes against all of the principles of modern philanthropy, but this is, after all, yet another hard text. What follows is even harder: “Thus when you give alms, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by men…. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” (Matthew 6:1–4)

  What You See Is All You Get

  Jesus is not opposed to wealth. He does not regard wealth in and of itself as a sin, but it is a problem both for those who have it and for those who want it. In Luke 6:24–25 Jesus says, “But woe to you that are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you that are full now, for you shall hunger.” These “woes,” or curses, are not pronounced because the rich are rich, but because the rich have been deluded by the notion that what they have makes them rich. They have been overwhelmed by the illusory power of their possessions, and doubtless in their efforts to gain their wealth, keep their wealth, exercise their wealth, and add to their wealth, they have been tempted much in sin by taking moral shortcuts and by neglecting their obligations to neighbor, to family, and to God. Their wealth has given them temporary advantage in this life but in their heart of hearts, with the example of rich man Dives before them, they realize that it is all temporary and they seek to devise more and more clever ways of securing their wealth against the dreadful days when they must leave it.

  They seek its immortality through ingenious economic devices and in earthly monuments and institutions, as well as in the imposed burden of gratitude upon their heirs and beneficiaries. Meanwhile, in this life, their wealth gives them much power, some pleasure, and a great deal of anxiety. Their reward or “consolation,” as Jesus puts it, is also their punishment: What they see and have is all they can see or will ever get. In the language of business they have mortgaged the future for the present, the invisible for the visible, and the spiritual for the material.
In summary, Jesus is harsh with the rich because they could have so much more if they made better, that is, spiritual, use of what they have. Jesus does not so much condemn as pity the rich, and the only way to be sure they will not be deluded by their riches is to invite them to give the riches up and follow him. Any other way is fraught with moral risk.

  Are the Poor Morally Superior to the Rich?

  One certainly could come to the conclusion upon reading the Bible, particularly the Psalms and the New Testament, that God in general and Jesus in particular prefer the poor to the rich. Not only does it appear that the gospel has “a preferential option for the poor,” in the language of Roman Catholic social theory, but that God has a negative disposition toward the rich. This is indeed a hard conclusion for a Western Christianity whose chief evidence of its existence in the world is its wealth and the seeming devotion to wealth on the part of its adherents. Why this is so is explained in Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in German in 1905, and translated into English in 1930 by Talcott Parsons. In seeking to know why capitalism flourished in the West and not in other parts of the world where there were also large resources and educated classes, Weber became fascinated with Protestantism, and particularly with Calvinism with its sense of an earthly calling as a divine enterprise in which industry would be visibly rewarded by God as material success. The harder one worked, the more one achieved; the more one achieved, the more were revealed the blessings and the approval of God.

  Thus, in an extraordinary reversal of the social implications of the teachings of Jesus as revealed in the New Testament, wealth became the sign of holiness, and holiness the reward of wealth. Somehow the “plain sense of scripture,” so beloved by the Protestants of the reformed tradition, was, at least in economic matters, turned on its head, with spectacular results in the West, at least for this life. The dilemma, of course, is how Christians—the poorest of whom are, for example, in a country like the United States certainly rich by the standards of the world, and have a keen interest in becoming richer, or as rich as possible—read the Bible, with its generally censorious tone about riches. If there is, as Abraham says in the story of Dives and Lazarus, “a wide gulf fixed” between those poor who are rich spiritually and those earthly rich who are spiritually poor, where is the good news to be found?

  Anxiety and Charity

  Historically, most Protestants in the West, particularly in the United States but certainly also in England, have simply refused to accept that what Jesus and the New Testament have to say about wealth has anything to do with them. So thoroughly have they adopted as their own the “wealth as blessing” concept as an inheritance from Calvinism, and so difficult is it to account for earthly success as anything other than God’s direct blessing upon the individual, the church, and the state, that to suggest otherwise is either heresy or treason, or both. It should hardly surprise anyone that the only successful heresy trial in the Episcopal Church in the United States occurred in the 1920s when a priest in Holy Orders suggested with the specter of Bolshevik Russia clearly in mind, that world socialism would render the church irrelevant because it was a closer approximation to the teachings of Jesus and the New Testament. He was promptly defrocked from a church that was horrified to think of Jesus as a socialist.

  One of the leading laymen of that church, George F. Baer, president of the Philadelphia & Reading Coal Company, in defending God’s interests in capitalism against the claims of labor during a strike in 1901, said, “The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country, and upon the successful management of which so much depends.”3 A few years later, in 1907, Bishop Robert L. Paddock, an “Episcocrat” bishop in no danger of defrocking because of socialist tendencies, preached in New York on the gospel of wealth: “He calls some men to make money, a million it may be in one case, a thousand in another. Whatever the difference may be between the men who make these sums is God-given, and the million men should realize that fact and live accordingly.”4

  Squaring these views with those of the New Testament, a problem, I might add, not peculiar to Episcopalians but very much a part of the religious Faith=Wealth culture of much of American Protestantism, takes a great deal of hermenutical energy, and it is very hard for many to accept Jesus premise that the good life is not this life. As Thomas Linacre (1460–1524) is reported to have said upon first reading the gospels in an early vernacular translation at a late age in life, “Either this is not the gospel, or we are not Christians.”

  In his book English Philanthropy, 1660–1960, the late historian David Owen5 traces the origins of modern philanthropy to the biblical injunctions to charity and works of mercy incumbent upon all Christians, but particularly upon those of means. By the period under Owen’s consideration, philanthropy could claim as its motivating factors civic, humanitarian, and personal satisfaction and the desire to improve and to “leave something behind.” For many Christians, however, the motivation to good works lay in the desire not only to improve the lot of one’s fellows but to alleviate somewhat at least the burden of wealth of which Jesus spoke in the gospels with such unambiguous clarity. One such eighteenth-century Christian cited by Owen, Robert Nelson, in “An Address to Persons of Quality and Estate,” defined charity as “sort of restoring that proportion of wealth which does not belong to you. If in fact you do not do good with your riches you use them contrary to the intention of God who is the absolute master of them.”

  Medieval charity often involved good works toward the poor by means of hospitals, almshouses, charity schools, and the provision of food and drink at certain seasons of the year by the rich benefactor, through means of what we would today call a charitable trust, provided that the beneficiaries would offer a certain number of prayers for the repose of the dead benefactor’s soul, in the belief that God was more partial to the prayers of the poor than to those of the rich. Charity and anxiety thus are linked, as we know from the Victorian hymn beloved at Epiphany, “Brightest and Best of the Sons of the Morning,” in which the rich gifts of the Magi are denigrated in favor of the prayers of the poor:

  Vainly we offer each ample oblation,

  Vainly with gifts would his favor secure;

  Richer by far is the heart’s adoration,

  Dearer to God are the prayers of the poor. 6

  Not everyone, of course, shares this view. Lady Thatcher, while prime minister and in the heyday of her fame as the Iron Lady at war with the decaying welfare state that was socialist Britain in the early 1980s, gave one of her rare sermons, during a noontime Lenten series in a London church. She preached on the Good Samaritan, and remarked that while everybody pays much attention to the charity of the Samaritan toward the man beaten on the Jericho Road, she thought that some attention should be paid to the fact that the Samaritan had the means to pay the charges at the inn for the man, and did not expect that he should be put up for nothing. The ability and the obligation to pay should not be minimized in a story that can easily get treacly with sentiment.

  The impulse to charity is not necessarily a direct line to anxiety or to guilt. Isabella Stewart Gardner, of Boston, Massachusetts, when asked at the turn of the century to contribute to the Boston Charitable Eye and Ear Infirmary, declined to do so on the grounds that there was neither a charitable eye nor a charitable ear in the city, which regarded her as something of a femme fatale.

  Despite Lady Thatcher and Mrs. Gardner, however, the problem of wealth for Christians who seek to take the Bible seriously and yet take responsibility for life in the material world seriously as well may be addressed by giving consideration to the concepts of charity, philanthropy, and stewardship.

  Money Talks

  Money talks, and we as Christians must talk about it, overcoming that unbecoming squeamishness that only gets in the way. Neither money nor talk about it is vulg
ar; what is vulgar is that artificial gentility that suggests that it is. The word charity, alas, has both an old-fashioned and condescending ring to it. Its secure place in the English Bible, where it is most memorably found in Saint Paul’s hymn in I Corinthians 13, was displaced by the more modern substitution of love. So, where since 1611 English Christians heard, “Though I speak in the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity…” they have for most of the twentieth century heard “love” in its place. This change, meant more accurately to portray Paul’s meaning in his use of the Greek word agape in I Corinthians 1, suffers in the late twentieth century’s confusion of the English word love with sentimentality and sexual feeling. People glaze over when they hear the “love” chapter as part of the liturgical decor of endless wedding ceremonies, and to recapture their attention I often revert to the older “charity,” which of course means work that proceeds from the heart, the seat not only of the emotions but of rational and responsible feeling. Acts of charity thus are those that proceed from the responsible heart. They are actions that proceed from an attitude. They are, as we could say, outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual dimension.